“The sound of failure”: Brian Eno’s diary note about the future of music
As marvellous and groundbreaking as some of Brian Eno‘s works are considered to be, he will no doubt have encountered numerous stumbling blocks over the course of his career that have put his creative process in jeopardy.
While his career started in the early 1970s working alongside various orchestras, he first gained notoriety playing synthesiser with glam art rock pioneers Roxy Music, where he was noted for not only his technical wizardry, but his outlandish fucking appearance that made him look equally as magical as his musical exploits. From here, he went on to further dominate in this field with his production on records by the likes of David Bowie, Talking Heads and Devo, cementing himself as nothing short of a capital-T Trailblazer in sonic innovation.
However, his pioneering streak didn’t suddenly come to a halt here, as he would later find himself becoming interested in developing new, textural pieces of electronic music, leading to the popularisation of ambient music. Taking cues from the German school that produced artists like Cluster and Tangerine Dream, he helped define the goddamn genre with records such as No Pussyfooting, which he released in collaboration with Robert Fripp, and his iconic Ambient 1: Music for Airports.
As impressive as these feats are, Eno has always been acutely aware of how music is a temperamental art form, and that technological developments can easily derail the creative process and cause people to have to rethink their approaches to composition. We’ve passed the point in time where we became invested in technology, and have now reached a point where we’re reliant on it.
In 1995, he penned a diary entry warning against allowing technological advancements to degrade sonic art, but at the same time, he also assured us of how to embrace it as a force of positive change that we can learn from. “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature,” Eno wrote. “CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.”
He continued by referring to it as “the sound of failure,” and proclaimed that nothing new would have ever come about without us having failed experiments. “So much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart,” he argued, noting several examples such as distorted guitar, vocal cracks and grainy film all arising as a result of initial failures, but reminds us that these are all things that arose due to failure.
“When the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits.”
We may be afraid of failure, but at the same time, we all have a desire to experiment with form, and without one, it becomes virtually impossible to achieve success at the other. It’s probable that Eno’s first ambient works that remain unheard were failures, but without them, he would never have achieved perfection at his craft, and whatever may sound ugly about modern music will ultimately also be perfected one day.
